Needle in the Blood (57 page)

“No! That’s for the little birds,” she shouts. “They’re such bullies. They all ought to be in a pie.”

Odo laughs and pats her knee. “Always championing the underdog. Go and see about the horses, Osbern, we’ll be along shortly.”

“What is all this mystery about the mason’s house, then?”

“Walk with me.” He takes her arm, pressing it against his side so she can feel his heart beating against the back of her wrist, and leads her along one of the three paths crossing the rose bed, each built of thirty-three stones to represent the Trinity, across a square of camomile lawn which releases its apple-sweet scent like a gift to their nostrils as they tread over it, along the edge of the west-facing cloistered terrace where they often sit in the evenings.

“Osbern used to be a soldier, a very good one. The year of the French invasion, he was part of my personal bodyguard.”

“What happened? Was he hurt?”

“No, I found out he was a skilled midwife.”

“Now you’re talking in riddles.”

“The mason’s house. It’s where Adeliza used to live.”

“Oh.” She withdraws her arm from his.

“You mustn’t mind. She hasn’t lived there for a long time. She married again, a merchant from Rouen. But…John was born there. His mother was the widow of my last master mason. I suppose that’s why I wanted you to see it.”

“And yet you will not come with me? You send me with your servant. Who I think doesn’t like me.”

“It is his desire.”

“And since when have the wishes of servants been your concern?”

“Osbern is different. He serves me, not out of loyalty to me or because I pay him well, but out of love for my son. He safeguards me for John’s sake. You see, it was Osbern who brought John into the world.”

They have reached the end of the terrace. Odo takes her hand to prevent her walking on toward the stables and they stand for a moment, awkwardly. He has never told the story of John’s birth before, and he is afraid his words will be inadequate to convey the mystery of it, the mixture of fear and elation, the remembered, yet oddly unfamiliar image of himself cradling his son in his mail-clad arms.

Gytha wishes he would not go on. She knows it is not his fault, he knows nothing about her children, the pain she knots into the hairs she tucks beneath their mattress. But somehow she expects him to understand and is irritable with him that he does not.

“Won’t you be late?” she asks.

“For what? I have no one to see, just accounts to go over, that sort of thing.”

He sits down on the edge of the terrace and takes a deep breath, savouring the perfume of camomile and sun-warmed stone. “I was twenty,” he begins. “I had Henry of France encamped on my doorstep and a message from William ringing in my ears that I was to hold Bayeux at all costs. One half of me knew it would be straightforward. William had already cut a swathe through Henry’s forces, and their supply lines were stretched to breaking point. But the other half was in a spin. I hadn’t the vaguest idea how to conduct a siege; every word I had ever read on the subject had gone right out of my head, and all I could think of was Adeliza, in that house right under the city wall with her child—my child—due any day.”

He pauses, looking up at her with that self-deprecating smile of his, then continues. “The second time I lost my place during prayers for the safety of the city, my chaplain, who was a practical man, told me to send some good men to fetch her to the palace and then put her out of my mind till we had dealt with the French.

“I sent Osbern and a couple of others, but before they could return, Henry had launched his assault. And, thank God, I was busy enough with our defence to stop thinking about her until the French were beaten off and I went out to inspect the damage, where one of the other men found me and begged me to come straight to the mason’s house. It seemed to take forever to get there, the streets were full of people celebrating, all stopping me to thank me, press wine on me and so forth. I was…I felt…as though I was the only man in the world ever to have achieved something so extraordinary as becoming a father, and at the same time ashamed. Because all these people believed I was their hero and really, I had done nothing. Henry had brought about his own defeat entirely.

“Anyway, I found Adeliza safe and well, sitting up in bed nursing her child, and Osbern beside her feeding her a broth of fennel which, he told me with great assurance, would help bring down her milk.”

Until now, Gytha has listened to him without comment. Now she gives a curt nod of affirmation.

“It was the strangest thing,” he goes on, misled by her silence. “Adeliza put the baby in my arms and when I looked at his face, I…recognised him. I can’t put it any better, even though I know it’s nonsense.” Lost in his memories, his senses once again filled with the scent of his son, clean linen, milky breath, the perfection of his ears and fingernails, his lashless eyelids and the tiny, moist sound of him sucking his bottom lip in his sleep, he does not notice Gytha turn away, digging her nails into her palms.

“It was your idea, wasn’t it? The mason didn’t ask for me to go there, you wanted it.”

“Well, yes, I admit it would please me.”

“I can’t go.”

“Why? Because of Adeliza? I’ve told you, she’s been in Rouen for years.”

“Not Adeliza. I wish you would understand. It’s John. I can’t go because of John.” She starts to walk away from him, in the direction of the stables. She longs to flee to her own room but is unsure of being able to find it.

“John?” He follows her, attempts to take hold of her hand, but she twists it out of his grasp. “Gytha.” Lengthening his stride, he overtakes her easily as she crosses the stableyard.

“You may unsaddle that horse,” she tells the groom holding her mare beside the mounting block, “there has been a change of plan.” The groom remains motionless until Odo repeats her instruction; her French is still incomprehensible.

“Gytha.” Hands on her shoulders this time, bearing down, fingers digging into the web of flesh beneath the bone. “Stop. This has something to do with your children, hasn’t it?” His tone is that of a man to whom a mystery has been revealed. “Are you afraid we shall not have any?”

“Please don’t ask me about my children.”

“Because you mustn’t be. I know I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I should like more children, but I won’t love you any the less if God sees fit to deny me.”

“Oh well, if you and God are content, why should I worry?” She scratches the black nose of a stallion, tethered on his own in the far corner of the yard. “Are you enjoying yourself, horse? We humans are a pretty spectacle, aren’t we?”

Odo stands next to her, arms hanging helpless at his sides. “Tell me, Gytha,” he pleads, “tell me what happened?”

“I can’t talk about it, not even to you.”

“Careful,” he warns as she begins to scratch the horse harder. “He has an awful temper, this one. Don’t make him bite you.” He summons a careless sounding laugh to conceal his hurt. “You are honoured. He doesn’t usually let anyone near him except his groom. I keep him for stud. He’s a purebred Turkey, a gift from the Patriarch of Alexandria.”

“Do you not place your soul in peril, accepting gifts from an excommunicate?” Her tone is sulky, but there is a spark of curiosity.

“Just because he believes one thing about the Trinity and I another doesn’t mean we should fall out over important matters like horse breeding. I call the horse Filioque, to remind me that good may come even of schism.”

She smiles, but she still feels the souls of her children plucking at the frayed threads of her heart. “Odo, what do you believe?”

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and Earth…”

Now she laughs. It is not his fault they died; priest he may be, but he cannot take all men’s sins and shortcomings on himself, and he cannot bring her children back. Go, she tells them, sit quietly, behave yourselves until I can be with you again. The horse, as if jealous, tosses its head, butting Odo in the chest. “Be serious,” she orders. “You are never serious. Even the horse thinks so.”

“All right. I believe God made me to love you. Seriously. Now perhaps the damned horse will not knock me over.”

***

She does agree to sit for the master mason, though in his tracing house rather than at his home, an arrangement more suitable to them both as the light is better there. While the master prepares his sketching tools, she occupies herself leafing through a pile of drawings on his work table.

“Your son?” she asks in her hesitant French, pausing over the image of a round-faced boy with a shock of hair falling into one eye, and a broad grin which reveals the absence of both top front teeth. He must be six or seven years of age, she thinks.

“Master John,” replies the mason, glancing over her shoulder, “just before he was sent away.”

“He is not very like his father.”

The mason shrugs. “Might be by now. Boys change.” He taps his own front teeth. “These will have grown for one thing. He hasn’t been back here in years, now my lord bishop has so many commitments in England.”

She lays the drawing aside with a polite smile. Though she understood nothing of the master’s reply except the word Angleterre, his disapproving tone was unmistakable. And the gesture with the teeth was not polite. Perhaps he dislikes the English, or perhaps the fact that his bishop has a son, in which case…

“Are you ready to begin?” she asks, suddenly anxious for the sitting to be over as quickly as possible. The master looks surprised but nods his assent, then shakes his head vehemently as she turns her head to the light. Picking up the sketch of John from the table, he places it in her lap where she is sitting close to the open north side of the tracing house, the pure, pale spring light bathing one side of her face while the other remains in soft shadow.

“This is better,” he explains slowly. “Your expression is right when you look at the picture. So…look, please.”

***

The master takes the finished drawing to Odo with a light heart. It is the best he has done, the agony of loss and powerlessness so perfectly captured in that slight, concentrated frown, the sad, grave curve of the bowed neck. She is, he comments without a trace of irony, the perfect Magdalene at the foot of the Cross. Odo agrees, though he looks more exasperated than gratified.

***

He takes her outside the city walls to the handsome new abbey he has built to the glory of Saint Vigor, on land which still bears the scars of forest clearance but where he can already see, in his mind’s eye, lawns and an herb garden and white cattle grazing.

She is among the congregation gathered to witness him and Abbot Robert bestowing their blessing on a party of knights setting out for Jerusalem to do penance for the murder of a neighbour’s two sons during a border dispute. In Chapter she sees a young oblate, no more than eight or nine years old, handed over to the monastery by his parents; when he is presented to Odo, Odo raises him from his knees and kisses his pale cheeks, causing the boy’s father to puff out his chest like a fighting cock. A murmur runs around the chapterhouse in response to his unusual gesture, and he glances up as if to quell it, but she knows he is looking, not at the assembled community, but at the fresco behind them, depicting him, baculum in hand, conducting the defence of Bayeux from the top of the city wall. He is measuring the distance from schoolboy to hero, son to father.

After Chapter, he shows her his tomb in a side chapel of the abbey church, dedicated to his patron saint, whose familiar image gazes down sternly from a niche in the wall beside the altar. The tomb stands before the altar, finely wrought of the same pale Caen stone he used to build his atelier in Canterbury, its sides decorated with friezes, only the lid left plain, waiting for the effigy of the bishop himself, the unimaginable postscript to this unforeseeable life. Stilled heart, petrified breath. He takes her hand.

“I recognise him,” she says, pointing to a relief of Turpin, four spears sticking out of his body, decapitating a fantastically bearded infidel.

“You know the Song of Roland, then. I always thought it a very Norman preference.”

“Strangely enough, it was a great favourite of King Harold. I have heard it sung many times, though I understand it poorly. But who is this?” she asks, indicating a muscular carving on the front of the tomb depicting a haloed saint slaying a dragon.

“It’s Saint Vigor himself. He was a dragon slayer.”

“It makes me think. The Godwinson family emblem was a dragon.”

“And are there not dragons to be found in Wales?”

“I believe so, my lord, though I have never been there.”

“Well, if there are, I dare say my brother’s armies will make short work of them.”

“I think Welsh dragons may be more easily tamed by kisses than the sword, my lord.”

“You think the saint should kiss the dragon?”

“If he dares. It would take more courage than to slay him.”

“Gytha?”

“Yes?”

“Will you lie with me here? When we are both dead? ‘Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones?’” Standing on tiptoe, she kisses his cheek. “Don’t be maudlin. What a thing to think about on such a beautiful day.”